• AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    How much ewaste has Microsoft caused just by wanting to sell more copies of the next version of windows.

      • Norah (pup/it/she)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        3 hours ago

        On a machine that can run it. If you have one of the machines that are the subject of this article, the only upgrade path is to buy a new one, for which Microsoft takes a healthy OEM fee for including Win11. You can easily see that cost on devices like the Legion Go S that cost significantly less for the SteamOS version.

  • venotic@kbin.melroy.org
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    5 hours ago

    Linux. Each Linux OS, breathes new life into an old laptop. Least if that laptop is at least 15 ~ 20 years old. Laptops from the late 90s though? May have to go very old school Linux.

  • The_Caretaker@lemm.ee
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    10 hours ago

    Install Linux on them and give them to school children so they can go to school online and not have to worry about being shot. I also see a lot of lithium in that pile.

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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    2 hours ago

    It breaks my heart that so much of these will end up in landfills. Resell them. Or send them to device recycling. There’s a shitload of rare earths in modern-ish but obsolete computers. And downcycling is possible too - my router is an old Lenovo thin client with a dual port 10g SFP+ card slapped in it.

  • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
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    14 hours ago

    The right answer is definitely not landfill.

    Most people use their computers to run a web browser, maybe a word processor or media player, and… not much else. Even someone who has only used Windows can figure out those basics on a Linux desktop.

    If the charities are unable/unwilling to provide support for Linux, they could give computers away on Craigslist before dumping more e-waste into our environment.

    • earphone843@sh.itjust.works
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      14 hours ago

      My wife’s 90 year old grandma was able to pick up Mint with absolutely no issue. Just put the shit she needed on the desktop and that was that.

      • MooseyMoose@lemmy.world
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        14 hours ago

        I did that for my grandmother with FreeBSD many moons ago, on a Pentium3 no less. It ran for years and years like a champ. Booted straight into PySol since that was pretty much all she ever did on a computer.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.org
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      15 hours ago

      Even someone who has only used Windows can figure out those basics on a Linux desktop.

      You’d think…

      • ChilledPeppers@lemmy.world
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        3 hours ago

        Lol, I switched to kde plasma and because the windows logo bottom left was replaced with a K, neither my dad or my sister knew how to shut down the pc 🤦‍♀️

  • sudoku@programming.dev
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    11 hours ago

    Looking at the used market where I live, quite a large number of laptops are already sold with Windows 11 installed even when officially unsuported. Activated with MAS as well, probably.

  • PokerChips@programming.dev
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    12 hours ago

    I think there are a lot of gunky software out there that only works on Windows. I tried getting my mom on Linux but I was unable to find any good open source sewing and graphic alternatives to the expensive lock in hardware that she had already bought.

    Although I doubt these are the kind of road blocks charities are facing.

    • Zloubida@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      “Companion softwares” for hardware are the only thing that still makes me use my Windows VM. In my case it’s my children’s educative computers which need a real computer to add content.

  • dukeofdummies@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    … that’s a really compelling reason for linux.

    I mean the next few years are going to be rough. Being able to recycle these things for basic use is going to be huge. Windows, mac, people need the internet more than anything else. It’s a sad way to gain adoption but it could be insanely impactful…

  • unquietwiki@programming.dev
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    11 hours ago

    One thing I wonder about Linux is the OOBE for new users. A lot of Linux distros have you create the user and whatnot when you install the OS; it’s not always intuitive on making a new user account to personalize. It’d make it a lot easier to preinstall distros and then let the user deal with finishing setup to their needs.

    • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
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      10 hours ago

      At least Mint has an OEM install; on the first boot after installing the system, it asks you to create a user (plus language, layout etc.). I never used it though, but I expect other distros to have a similar feature.

  • fubarx@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    One-click Linux cluster. Local compute, NAS, or self-hosting. Be a shame if it all ended in landfill.

  • Back in the day, there was a distributed cluster OS called Mosix. Even back then I had several spare computers lying about, and the idea of being able to chain them all together and have one virtual computer that would automatically distribute processing without special coding was enticing. It turned out to not work very well unless you did specially code for it, or clustered the computers very tightly with fiber; it just wasn’t worth it.

    But when I see piles of compute like this, a part of my still wants to network them all together and run … well, whatever fills the shoes of OpenMosix these days, if anything does.

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      6 hours ago

      Yeah, I’ve always wanted to do something like that. I’ve always got a bunch of computers running virtually idle and it would be nice if they could just help out with whatever your main PC is doing.

    • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
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      16 hours ago

      Some modern workloads can take advantage of multiple computers. You can usually compile using things like distcc and spread the load across them.

      If you make them into a Kubernetes cluster you can run many copies or many different things.

      It’s still an unsolved problem: we still end up with single core bottlenecks to this day, before even involving other machines altogether.

      • Yes. It’s always the bandwidth that’s the main bottleneck, whether CPU-Memory, IPC, or the network.

        Screw quantum computers; what we need is quantum entangled memory sharing at a distance. Imagine! Even if only within a single computer, all memory could could be L1 cache.

  • Merlin@lemm.ee
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    15 hours ago

    I understand that people need to be a bit more tech savvy to use Linux over windows but I reckon that KDE for example is really similar to windows (but actually much much better) and with the ai chatbots we currently have available I reckon any non-tech users would be able solve most of the issues with the chatbot’s help

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe
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      3 hours ago

      I’m tech savvy, been in IT for nearly 40 years. Wrote my first program in Fortran on punched cards.

      Linux is no easy switchover. It’s problematic, regardless of the distro (I’ve tried many over the years).

      My latest difficulty - went to install Debian and it hung multiple times trying to install wifi drivers.

      Mint can’t use my Logitech mouse until I researched it and discovered someone wrote an app to enable it. The most popular mouse on the planet doesn’t work out of the box.

      Typical user would be stumped by these problems.

      I can go on for days about “Year of the Linux Desktop” (which I first heard in 2000). Can Linux work as a desktop? Definitely. And it can be pretty damn good, too, if your use-case aligns with it’s capabilities. But if you’re an end-user type, what do you do a year in and realize you need a specific app that just doesn’t exist in Linux?

      Is it a direct replacement for Windows? No. Because Windows has always been about general use - it trades performance for the ability to do a lot of varied things, it includes capabilities that not everyone needs.

      Linux is the opposite, it’s about performance for specific things. If you want a specific capability, it has to be added. This is the challenge these different distros attempt to meet: the question for all of them is which capabilities to include “out of the box” (see my mouse example - Debian handles it just fine).

      This is also the power of Linux, and why it’s so great for specific use-cases. Things like Proxmox, TrueNAS, etc, really benefit from this minimalism. No wasted cycles on a BITS service or all the other components Windows runs “just in case”.

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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      12 hours ago

      Only tech savvy for installing an OS, other than that Linux is a better experience for less tech savvy users. My wife struggled with Windows and how things don’t make sense (it was also slow) so I setup nixOS with GNOME, no more complaints

      • mat@linux.community
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        11 hours ago

        Does your wife install packages with NixOS? This is one of the few distros I tried (and now main) that I genuinely cannot recommend to anyone not willing to spend days learning the lang & concepts.

        • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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          7 hours ago

          No, she is very bad with tech. I have added everything she needs for her web, email, spreadsheet, zoom call use. NixOS is super easy for an average person who can edit a text file though. You go to this site https://search.nixos.org/packages , search what you want, it gives you the code to paste into your config, and run a rebuild…or options for a temp install. Seems painless.

          • mat@linux.community
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            4 hours ago

            Good point… I tend to give family members Flatpak-based distros like Fedora for the nice app store experience, but I guess if you can get past the scaryness of test editing and rebuilding with a console, NixOS does come with the benefit of having waaaay more packages and much easier rollback. My poor father trying to run nvidia drivers on Fedora Kinoite, who has to rebuild the kernel for every package install…

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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    12 hours ago

    Get new machines

    That sounds unreasonable until you realize that an 8th gen CPU isn’t bad. Other option is to pay for long term support.